Back in the middle of August we talked about the Sony Playstation 4's next system update. At the time there was some leaked info from a beta of System Software 3.0 running in Japan. Of course whether it was legit or not was unclear.

Now we know it was. Earlier this week Sony themselves posted about what to expect in System Software 3.0. The highlights for me are live streaming to YouTube, a new Community feature that lets gamers self-organize around common interests, and the expansion of online storage from 1 GB to 10 GB.

Sony invited users to sign up to beta test the new System Software back in August, and invitations have now started going out. The beta signup page is no longer online so I guess they have enough testers. Sorry if you missed out!

There's an NDA in place, but some of what Sony is asking users to test is inherently public, like sharing 10 second clips to Twitter or the previously mentioned live-streaming to YouTube. There are also user-to-user features like "Request to Watch Gameplay" which will also be hard to test without giving away that you're in the beta. The point being, I expect we'll see more leaks over the coming weeks.

I'm going to assume the beta is going generally well because if it wasn't, by now some disgruntled tester would've complained to the press about it. Sony says they'll punt you from the beta if you break NDA, but if the beta was causing you problems you probably wouldn't care if you got booted from the program. So that's my round-about logic for why I suspect there're no widespread problems.

There's no indication of how long the beta will run or when the rest of us will get System Software 3, but with Microsoft launching a big update for the Xbox One in November I'm guessing Sony will also want to have new features to show off. So if I were a betting man I'd guess that we'll all be running the new version by Thanksgiving.